2024 marks the 45th anniversary of the Choose Your Own Adventure series’ inception. We’re celebrating here by ranking the classic Choose Your Own Adventure book covers of the 20th century and presenting you with the best of the best. If you’re due for a dose of nostalgia, keep scrolling to relive those rainy Saturday afternoons spent trying to find all 25 — or more — possible endings.
Choose Your Own Adventure was the brainchild of Edward Packard, who based his branching-path “gamebooks” on the interactive bedtime stories he told his children. Packard presented the idea to indie publisher and RPG writer R.A. Montgomery, who published Packard’s Sugarcane Island as the first installment in Vermont Crossroads Press’ Adventures of You series in 1976. Two years later, Montgomery left the press and approached another publisher, Bantam Books, with The Adventures of You. Bantam rechristened the series and launched it as Choose Your Own Adventure in 1979.
A publishing phenomenon was born.
The eight covers on the list below span the first two decades of Choose Your Own Adventure history. That time period produced some of the wackiest, most memorable covers, but it’s not without its problems. Many of the books and their covers contained racist stereotypes, most predominantly of the Yellow Peril and Islamophobic varieties. Thankfully, the series’ contemporary iterations have attempted to rectify these issues to some degree.
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Classic Choose Your Own Adventure book covers fall more or less neatly into two broad categories: “Does What It Says on the Tin” and “WTF Am I Looking At.” Both are entirely valid.